{"id":379520,"date":"2026-10-22T09:52:15","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T09:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/379520\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T09:52:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T09:52:15","slug":"new-york-public-library-gets-kiki-smith-gift-from-the-artists-sister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/379520\/","title":{"rendered":"New York Public Library Gets Kiki Smith Gift From the Artist\u2019s Sister"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThanks to the generosity of a sibling, the New York Public Library<\/a> (NYPL) is now the owner of some 250 prints by Kiki Smith<\/a>. They come as the gift of her sister, fellow artist Seton Smith<\/a>, who has pledged to give all future prints she receives by Kiki to the institution.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe library\u2019s Prints and Spencer Collections already have 30 other Smith prints and 12 of her artist\u2019s books, and with the new gift, including works from as far back as the 1990s and into the present, the library will have one of the most concentrated holdings of the artist\u2019s printed oeuvre in the United States.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"a<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI am very thrilled by my sister Seton Smith\u2019s gift to the New York Public Library because I could think of no more wonderful place for my prints to be,\u201d said Kiki Smith in press materials. \u201cPublic libraries are to be cherished.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe daughter of sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki Smith is a major art historical figure, represented by international gallery Pace, whose founder, Arne Glimcher, mounted a show of her work at his 125 Newbury Gallery in New York just this year. Jan Avgikos wrote in Artforum<\/a> that in one part of the show, \u201cSmith\u2019s meditations on life and temporality were threaded with wonder at the ineffability of the natural world,\u201d while describing another as \u201ca magnificently gruesome memory theater\u2014one that registered our failure to live together with our own transgressions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tKiki Smith, My Blue Lake (1994).<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tULAE. Courtesy of Kiki Smith.<\/p>\n

\n\tSmith has appeared in five Venice Biennales, and her work is included in museum collections internationally, from the Albertina in Vienna to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pompidou in Paris, New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Nancy Hass wrote in the New York Times<\/a> in 2018, Smith \u201chas, over the years, woven from glass, bronze, paper, glitter, steel, lead, clay and thread a vast, all-encompassing universe of enchantment, religious ecstasy and personal mythology.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSmith got her start in the late 1980s and 1990s. Madeleine Viljoen, curator of the NYPL\u2019s Prints and Spencer Collections, said in an email that \u201cInformed by medical texts like Gray\u2019s Anatomy, the works [Smith] produced during this period focused on the human body, featuring often graphic prints of individual organs, blood vessels, cellular forms, and bodily fluids. Rooted in feminism and unfolding against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, the works consider flesh and the human body with brutal honesty, viewing them as vessels for trauma, mortality, and political autonomy. By the late 1990s, her work began to explore folklore, mythology and religion from a feminist perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe NYPL will treat the works quite differently from what one might expect at an art museum.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe see these materials as art but also materials of study,\u201d said Julie Golia, director of the humanities and social sciences research library, in a video conversation. \u201cAnyone can come in with a library card and spend time with these materials, not behind glass but as a researcher. That kind of access is our special sauce here at 42nd Street.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe NYPL is a partner in Art Week NYC<\/a>, a citywide gathering celebrating New York\u2019s leading galleries, institutions, and cultural spaces, organized by ARTnews, Art in America, and Artforum. The inaugural event takes place from November 11\u201314, 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thanks to the generosity of a sibling, the New York Public Library (NYPL) is now the owner of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[118428,139286,9,24,55,54,24621,56,139287],"class_list":["post-379520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-art-week-nyc","tag-kiki-smith","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-new-york-public-library","tag-ny","tag-seton-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}